Welcome to my blog. I home school Jenson and Wren, who are 6 and 4 years old respectively. We live in Cheltenham in England with my husband, Simon, and all manner of animals including chickens, rabbits, a dog and a handful of fish. This is an online diary. It's a place for me to keep a record of the highs and lows of our home ed experience.

We had barely finished our pop up books before the children were getting ready for the next project. We'd been busily crafting since 8am so by 10am there was still plenty more time left in the day for more story telling opportunities.

After a quick tidy up from the pop up books, the children got stuck into their TV books. Wren had made a big dent on her story already - the day before, while Jenson had been creating a story about an owl family using our LEGO StoryStarter set, she had been beavering away drawing picture after picture of us all and Remy at the vets! I had so enjoyed watching her and her careful dedication to the detail in each.

She had over twenty pictures that I thought we could stick together on a long role of paper and turn into a 'moving' image.

I then helped Jenson with his TV book. Again, I did most of the cutting out to make the 'TV' and scroll sections. This was purely because the cardboard was so hard and his fingers weren't strong enough. The choice of box was all Simon's idea - an old wine box - we have plenty of those lying around!!

He did all the measuring.

Next he created a story to go on his scroll.

Scene 1

The dog is called Run. He runs and runs until...

Scene 2

...he sees a bear!!

Scene 3

He sees two of his friends; Spike, the hedgehog and Nibble, the rabbit. They have fun in the rain together, climbing trees.

It was a very simple story. It took longer to make the TV than it did to tell the tale. Saying that, the shortest stories are sometimes the sweetest and Jenson definitely enjoyed retelling it to Bunny.

Of course, it does mean that we now have an excess amount of foil and clingfilm folded up in our drawer having used the cardboard inner tubes to make the scroll mechanisms! The children had fun being wrapped up in the clingfilm though, or at least Jenson did. Wren wasn't overly keen on being taped to her brother!

As if those two projects weren't enough for one day, there were also several other smaller subsidiary learning topics going on. We had a play date with one of Jenson's best friends after school. Jenson was so excited he kept looking at the clock and asking how much longer it would be till we saw him. Inevitably this brought us onto the conversation of time and I was really impressed with how well Jenson grasped the concept. Our conversation began at 10am, at which point there were another five hours to go until 3pm. I explained about wholes, halves and quarters. It got round to 1pm and Jenson correctly said that it meant there were only two hours to go until 3pm. We have no numbers on our clock so the fact Jenson could use the symbols to identify the numbers left me giving him a big high five. As I pointed to each big black line, he correctly went around the whole clock telling me which number it was.

While I was taking a breather from the barrage of learning that Jenson was consuming, Jenson was getting stuck into building a LEGO volcano from his StoryStarter set. Meanwhile, Wren was busily cutting up pictures of Skye and her other Paw Patrol friends.

The volcano provided an excellent geography learning opportunity. I read Jenson some interesting facts about what volcanoes are, why they happen and how they are formed. We learned about tectonic plates and Pangaea. I showed Jenson the different parts of a volcano, from which point he started to refer to the hole at the top of his LEGO model as the vent. We learned about how crater lakes are formed and how many eruptions take place a year. We learned about what it means when a volcano is dormant and extinct and what lava actually is.

From volcanoes to collecting chicken eggs, but again, it provided another good opportunity for some maths. Jenson was easily able to count all 10 eggs out and was then able to tell me that half of 10 is 5.

Speaking of maths, we also had just enough time to squeeze in his daily homework topics, which also includes English. We all deserved a good play date at his friend's house that afternoon!